Page 90 of The Warmth of Our Closest Star

“The second voice?”

“The first voice is usually the one we’ve learned from society. What we’ve been trained to think,” Alex explained. “The second voice that comes after the bad thoughts is usually the one telling the truth. It starts as a whisper, but the more you practice listening, it eventually sounds like the voice of God. You can’t miss it.”

I stared at him.

“Does the first voice ever go away?” I asked.

“Well, right now, I’m being told that we need more food. So…take that as you will.”

I laughed uproariously.

“And,” he said, “I suggest that just this once, we don’t listen for the second voice. What do you say?”

I nodded and the two of us pulled ourselves up together.

“I’ll try to keep listening for the second voice before I act,” I said before we took a single step to walk back down the hill. “I really will.”

“Good,” Alex patted my shoulder. “But if it literally starts feeling like someone’s talking in your ear—go see a psychiatrist. This is all metaphorical, to be clear.”

Laughing, we walked down the hill together, back towards the party that was still, somehow, going on.

“Alex,” I asked as we trudged down the hill. “What do you think the meaning of life is?”

He laughed.

“What?” I chuckled nervously.

“There’s no meaning to life.”

“What?” I gasped.

“That’s what makes it so great,” he said, lacing his arm through mine. “If there’s no meaning, you get to make your own. And there are so many possibilities. I love possibility.”

What Could Go Wrong?

Dr. Berger was a middle-aged man with kind eyes and soft hands with nimble fingers, thick around the middle, and had an easy, comforting laugh. The moment he’d walked into the examination room where I’d been waiting inside his office in Chicago, I knew that I liked him. It was odd, traveling to a new city all by myself yet again, navigating the public transportation, and checking into a hotel as a single. Finding his office in the same fashion had been an arduous task as well, but one that I managed. After living in Montreal, there wasn’t a city whose culture I couldn’t figure out one way or another.

All glass and metal—sterile and cold—I was concerned that Dr. Berger would be a stern man who would convince me to give up. To run from his offices, deciding that all doctors were my enemy, once and for all. However, his bedside manner was warm and kind, though professional. Immediately upon meeting him, I felt that, at the very least, the trip I’d promised Dr. Bradley I’d take to Chicago, would not be a complete waste.

“So,” Dr. Berger sat before me on his little stool after examining me, “you’ve been living with this for—”

“My whole life,” I said, looking down at him from my perch on the paper-lined exam table.

Unlike Dr. Bradley’s shorter exam tables built with children in mind, Dr. Berger’s office had adult-sized furniture.

“How’s that going for you?” he asked.

“I suppose it is just what it is?” I shrugged. “C’est la vie?”

Laughing, he reached into his lab pocket. When his hand was pulled out, he was holding two lollipops. One red; one green. He held them up.

“Cherry or apple?” he asked.

I gave him a confused smile.

He jiggled them at me. “I keep them on hand for patients who have their kids with them. Sometimes I treat myself to one.”

Cautiously, I reached out and took the red one.